Email mining is an application that is a logical extension of the increased emphasis on the archiving and searching of email these days. It is driven by regulatory compliance and legal discovery. The latter have become cold, hard reality in today’s corporate world.
An Application for Business Success
“Email mining” extracts knowledge from a company’s rapidly expanding email stores, using specialized email archiving solutions. With the ongoing explosion of unstructured data, companies are increasingly finding it necessary to mine various types of knowledge bases, both within and outside their corporate walls. Call it what you will: knowledge mining, intelligence mining, or simply a variant of corporate search – it’s an efficient and valuable way to capture corporate knowledge.
Email mining is one type of intelligence mining that companies are already starting to do inside their own firewall. Email remains the killer app in business communications, and is not expected to relinquish that lead anytime soon.
Just How Big Is Corporate Email?
According to recent Radicati report, over 100 billion email messages are generated every day, up from 10 billion daily email just 10 years ago (data from IDC). The Radicati Group says the average corporate user sends and receives about 115 emails a day, using about 10 Mbytes of storage on a daily basis.
Today, emails contain reports, purchase orders, contracts, contract negotiations and project details in addition to other business information. These are important documents for business continuation and a gold mine for email mining. Most employees also send important documents to themselves for safe keeping.
Emails are not only used for communication they are also used for document repository. Ask any sales person where they store their important presentations. Most of them will tell you that they email the presentation to themselves, because they can always find them while they are on the road. Even the in-house sales people email the presentation to themselves. It is easier and safer to find documents in the inbox than on the computer hard drive.
You will also find contracts sent through emails. Most communication between companies happens via emails. From contract negotiation to contract signing, all of the communication occurs through corporate emails.
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